Kodi Community Forum

Hi there,

I am new to XBMC and the forums, so be nice!

After many hours of trying different distros and configurations (wiping the disk each time for a fresh install) I settled on Ubuntu 11.10 as this was the first distro that installed perfectly and played video files and youtube smoothly in HD.

The issue I have is quite a big one with regards to XBMC because anything I play is about 1 FPS (literally getting between 0.2 and 1.5 FPS!). If I play the same videos from the Ubuntu desktop using any of the players, they are fine. Similarly if I play online videos like youtube and tvcatchup they work fine outside of XBMC.

Surely it must be possible to play videos within a dedicated media front-end with the same performance as your standard desktop? At the moment I cannot use XBMC and can simply use my standard desktop. This is a bit disappointing because this machine is purely for watching videos!

Any advice on how I can get the playback to be as good as Gnome (or whatever Ubuntu is using)?

Thanks,
S

Welcome,

More likely your sbmc audio settings are not compatible with your current connected equipment, it greatly depends on bothe HTPC and connected equipment support, yes, bad audio settings do cause what you describe.

See AudioEngine/HOW-TO:_Configure_audio (wiki)

This is WELL documented and discussed to death all over forums.

uNi

Thanks for the quick reply. I have looked at the audio and it looks and sounds good. There are not many settings and it is stereo - the sound is perfect in fact. It may help some more if I mention that the GUI is sluggish - I have picked the quickest skin which improves that aspect. It just seems the whole of XBMC runs slowly. This is a Quad-core CPU as well, so it's not short on grunt and if I check the video information while playing a video, only 2 CPUs are being touched albeit CPU0 being 99%... could that be the issue? Can I make XBMC make better use of my CPUs?

On further watching - the CPUs are fine - during playback only one gets up to around 90-98% for a split second and this changes to any one of the cores at any one time while the rest are fairly idle. This all looks normal. It seems that if I lower the resolution it gets a bit quicker, but still poor even at 360p it is only a few FPS. It almost seems like I could force it to use 4 cores and it would be ok!

Please post you hardwarespecs / GPU for HTPC
OS/kernel bversion
Driver version.

Screenshot of xbmc audio settings.
How is HTPC conneted to TV/AVR HDMI/Optical etc.
What AVR is it what TV is it.

XBMC Video settings, playback etc, see last link on my signature and post those screenshots too.

uNi